See text below.
EXCERPTS
...
The [Atkinson Charitable Foundation] spent more than $3.1 million on charitable activities in 2008 and supported more than 30 groups and initiatives.
...
The Atkinson Foundation had a hand in Ontario's decision to introduce full-day school-based learning for 4- and 5-year-olds starting next year.
In 2007, Premier Dalton McGuinty appointed the foundation's executive director, Charles Pascal, to plan the initiative.
And Pascal's report, released last month, relied on several Atkinson-funded initiatives, including the Atkinson Centre for Society and Child Development, for key background support and research.
The centre's groundbreaking research on the benefits of linking child care to kindergarten and parenting centres through the First Duty pilot project at Bruce Junior Public School played a crucial role, says Pascal.
"It's all about improving programs for kids and families and to have leading-edge researchers like the folks at the (Atkinson) centre is really key," he says.
The centre, which operates out of the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), was created by an Atkinson endowment in 1999. It received $45,000 last year for ongoing research on the First Duty project.
The centre's main purpose is to link OISE research to early childhood education training at George Brown College and to programs for kids and families in the community, says centre coordinator Zeenat Janmohamed.
As a faculty member of George Brown College's school of early childhood for the past 14 years, Janmohamed's role is to foster that link. "The centre is the bridge to everything that is going on in the early years field – linking it to the research and academics more broadly," she says.
The centre's current research, to be released this fall, looks at integrating teachers and early childhood educators in the classroom.
"If the focus is on kids and families, what we have found is that it's better to pull together teacher education and early childhood education," Janmohamed says. It will, no doubt, provide an important counterpoint to teachers' unions that argue only teachers should deliver the new program, she adds.
- reprinted from the Toronto Star